I struggle to articulate what I mean by the ‘public secret’. Maybe that’s the problem; we all feel this pervasive, intangible ‘thing’ without the vocabulary to point and call it out. What ever we say never seems to be quite right and gets stuck in our throats. We seem to be lost in a state of frustration, confusion, and isolation.

I suppose that’s the main reason for the exhibition and the accompanying Instagram experiment. To emulate a familiar format like social media, or a bar, or a city, but also create a new space within the Neo-liberal framework that allows for honest contemplation and conversations which are met with empathy rather than embarrassment, or derision.

An anonymous submission for ‘The Public Secret Experiment’ Instagram account.

However, there have been a few other elements that have run through my mind over the past year whilst ‘The Public Secret’ exhibition, and my work for it, has congealed into a solid mass. I’ll try and run through some of them now.

Commodified Self Worth and Individualised Mental Health

Passage from ‘Out of the salon: female counter-spaces, anti-colonial struggles and transversal politics’ by sophie schasiepen

The symbiosis of the internal and external; the individual and the community is complex. What I do understand is to have a healthy connection between the two there has to be mutual support and respect. Late-capitalism blocks this communication, leaving us isolated and toxically dependent on the sugar rush of commodity.

Advertising, social media, retail therapy (“retail therapy”!!!) all play on the ‘be a better version of yourself’. The feedback loop for this commercial-self relies heavily on the not-quite-good-enough. For you to buy into it, it must first make you feel shit about yourself.

Self-worth comes from within, but we’re seeking it from false external springs that fail to nourish us internally – physically and mentally. We’re constantly seeking validation by comparing ourselves to others and its making us sick. How have we ended up in a time where we are having to have serious studies into ‘Facebook depression’?

Sadly, I don’t think we have found a sufficient way to talk about all this sincerely enough yet; its either too uncomfortable, or too sickly. We carry on regardless where it is familiar and safe and we can continue with our self-medicated therapy.

Gentrification

Richard Ford is a guy who came up with a way of predicting up-and-coming areas by looking at a regions current demographic – the Bohemian index and the Gay index. Two indicators that a geographic area will culturally bloom and become very lucrative to home owners, business owners, and property developers (think Berlin and San Francisco).

Post-industrial cities seem to becoming more notorious for cheap property development and depleting local authority budgets – making them more susceptible to gentrification.

Billboards for redevelopment in Sheffield. The shapes, colours, and wording are very childlike and links self-worth to commerce. A lego trail, ‘Bricktopolis’, was used as a promotional campaign aimed at children and families.

Social and affordable housing are at crisis point, due to a mix of government legislation, recession, and some other stuff I don’t understand. Local budgets are desperately low, leaving authorities in a position where they have to sell assets (or in some cases, like with art galleries, rent buildings for free). With that, private ownership – typically in the shape of landlords – goes up, along with the price of rent.

Another effect from central government’s hands off approach is the prestige projects. In an effort to attract business and leasure tourism, local governments come up with multi-million projects in a bid to make some money (they tend to flop spectacularly, leaving the region with a bigger deficit, and a weirdly designed building they have to frantically think up a purpose for. I’m looking at you Sheffield Hallam University Union Bar née National Museum of Popular Music). Also, these projects get passed with very little input from the community. Planning permission favors profit over social contribution.

Whether public or private, developments offer Utopian-like dreams – green space, blue skies, culture, fresh bread, dream jobs, unadulterated ecstasy. But its social mores are cut loose when economic value overrules social worth. It is not accessible for everyone (I’ve reminded myself of ‘city ambassadors’ shooing the homeless out of sight every time I go to The Winter Garden in Sheffield). The original occupants tend to be pushed out of the area due to raising living cost. The only jobs available are zero hour, or on a temporary basis only. The cost of living inevitably further isolates the already marginalised. And we’re back to the commodified self-worth; we are what we get paid to do.

Billboard for a new development on Whitehall Road, Leeds. Again linking purpose with work.

Mark Fisher and Acid Communism

Mark Fisher weaves through almost all of the work and discussions at the Retro Bar. Acid Communism particularly strikes in us some kind of hope for the future of the people on this planet (whatever the timescale). It is an idea Fisher, sadly, never fully completed. I can only offer my interpretation. Put briefly, acid communism is the reconsiderations of 60s counter culture; the raising of the collective conciousness, and sharing of experience as a form of chipping away at the capitalist monolith. I wouldn’t necessarily say this means we all live in the woods, tripping on acid, whilst tattooing inspirational quotes to our eyelids – however appealing that may be to some. I think it just means care more. Listen. Think. Empathise. I think Fisher is so popular with us because he spoke in a way that was sincere and didn’t make you cringe.

Individual Blame and Corporate Responsibility

I also think this isn’t just applicable to the introspective individual, but applies more and more to corporate responsibility. I see so much blame, anxiety, guilt and shame being put onto individuals to take responsibility for their own actions – and yeah, sure. But compare this to the actions and the impact corporate irresponsibility has to our planet and our communities. I’m sure you recycle, and I’m sure there are times when you cant be bothered. But do you incinerate millions of pounds worth of surplus clothing to keep your brand exclusive? My point being, the sum of our individual actions can sometimes feel measly compared to the damage being done by multinational businesses – its exhausting and you shouldn’t feel guilty for just chucking everything in your black bin. But please don’t give up.

Shared experience and Intellectual Property.

I’ll tell you what I love (and i sincerely mean love) about being a member of the Retro Bar and why I want to share the work we do with you.

The way in which we work, from initial meetings to actually seeing the ideas come to fruition is based on open conversation, shared ideas, and mutual support. I love when someone suggests an idea – even if its for their individual practice – and we all get hyper about it. I feel like I have found a place of nourishment and inspiration, of purpose, and hope for the future.

And I wish a happy and healthy future for all DIY spaces and artist led groups. We dwell in temporary and precarious places, which can be a breeding ground for competition. But, can also be a place of pulling resources and creating stronger networks of collective care.

Thanks for listening.

Bek.

More.

I’m by no means as well read as the other guys. My ideas are shaped by snippets of this and that roughly selotaped together with badly placed punctuation. But I’ll include some of my sources below if you want to check anything out.

PAUL SNG – Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle. A film that takes a look at the reduction of social housing and the reasons why.

As well as the above ideas here are some other sources of inspiration to me that have contributed to the work I have made for the ‘Public Secret’ Exhibition.

GRISELDA POLLOCK on Edouard Manet’s, The Bar at the Foiles Bergere, 1882. I saw this video quite late into the process, but I found Griselda (and Manet) articulated something I was trying to say far better than I ever will and she has helped me to frame my work.

EDWARD PAOLOZZI – I really like this artist and his critical irony through collages of mainstream media, imagined cityscapes, and bright colours.

The commodification of every aspect within society is an inevitable progression of a capitalist based economy. Marx expressed the potential contraction at the heart of this mode of production. The surplus-value, which is unpaid labour through production of commodities, is taken as profit by those with the means of production. These ‘means’ (which hold power) have been enshrined within society through centuries of class development and exploitation. We are beginning to truly see these contradictions played out on a global scale because the working classes (which includes a great generalisation of the stratifications in different societies) cannot afford to purchase the goods and services which they produce. As Marx pointed out this leads to constant boom and bust. Hence, the boom in the 90s perpetrated by de-regulating markets, improving production techniques to decrease the labour required to create products; and then the subsequent global financial crash in 2007-08 perpetrated by de-regulated markets selling to people who could not afford to buy services and commodities.

What does this abstract economics have to do with The Public Secret project?

The short answer is everything! The human concept of ‘value’ is at stake within this discursive web. What value do we place in relation to art? There is a long history attached to this question from Aristotle to Hegel and Svetlana Alpers to Claire Bishop the ‘worth’ of art, and subsequently its position within the ecology of culture and society, has been debated for millennia. This is a complex question as there is an obvious set of economic values including exchange-value and labour-wage value in the art market. These values are monetary and do not necessarily correlate with use-value or moral-value i.e. ethics. This distinction is important and the blurring of such boundaries within the collective consciousness of contemporary society is central to a gross public secret. Let me explain. The semiotics at play within the current form of neo-liberal capitalism, which is packaged in a gloriously glossy cellophane and sold to us on a daily basis, are neurotic.

My reasoning for the above statement is complex, and needs further discussion and debate beyond this text, and indeed plays out in the collective space created by the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe. I would like to add a pre-requisite at this stage, that, just as Marx and others have pointed out the processes at work within capitalist accumulation are not inherently good or bad. It is an empirical system, the problem occurs with its distribution, and the hierarchical systems of deep exploitation which has only accelerated with the neo-liberal ‘branding’ of capitalism on a global scale. It is to such an effect that a form of neurosis has occurred in which ‘we’ as a society attribute the word, ‘value’ almost exclusively to signify ‘monetary’ value. Indeed our motivations are entirely governed by such significations. Whether we admit to it or not, we are constantly comparing and weighing up the monetary value of commodities. This plays out in its most distilled form on the international stock exchange, built on risk -reward scarcity. It plays out on social media, particularly through Instagram, and the rising cult of the ‘celebrity life’ story, which is rewarded with increasing monetary value. The image = value = money.

Historically, there is a discourse within art which has opposed the capitalist system. The development of Conceptual art of the 60s and 70s, which aimed to de-materialise the art object not only in an attempt to deconstruct the forces of the art market, but also to finally liberate art from its own materiality. However, the forces of capital and a market driven art world managed to circumvent such a critique and re-appropriate its resistance into the commodification of ‘ideas’. The strangest, most outrageous coupled with the most banal was the name of the game. Figures such as: Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth and Marina Abramovic became prominent within the art world and beyond. It is precisely this phenomena or the ‘cult of the artist as celebrity’ which the market could sell. It did not matter how problematic the theme of the artwork was or how ‘de-materialised’ the object; the art world was dealing on reputation and on endless novelty. Of course, many artists before and since have played on these notions of the art market including, Warhol, Hirst and Duchamp to name a few. Their practice was to recognise this problematic at the centre of the art world and not to resist openly but dance on the razors edge between appropriation and co-option.

There is course a metaphysical trace in play to this narrative. Philosopher Jacques Derrida articulated this in Structure, Sign and Play (1966). Derrida suggested that, ‘the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies’. Derrida is referring to a history in which societies have always assigned an abstract anchor or centre for belief such as: Magic, God, Man, Science etc. in which to build their entire society. Derrida suggested that we are limited by the language of the past, of our ancestors, as we must constantly destroy and remake their systems again and again in different ways in order to create ‘new’ structures. However, the ‘event’ which Derrida is referring to is when we began to question the centre and the structure revealed itself to no longer be a structure but a system of substitutions of signs. This is particularly important to our current question of the public secret, as a growing secularity within societies across the world is resulting in religion being expelled from the centre of belief. It is for this reason that many people are simply motivated by the prospect of gaining more capital, more social power bought through the accumulation of wealth. As they are no longer subjected to the moral codes imposed by religion. This of course, is not the entire picture but nevertheless the importance of gaining wealth as a motivational factor is a vital discourse.

It is paramount that as individuals within a society we have a centre of belief, even if we know rationally it is not a ‘real structure’. This is essentially an ideology. Our collective wellbeing and mental health relies upon it, as the complete ‘free-play’ of significations, which Derrida suggested is taking place, implies possible infinities. As humans we cannot greatly conceptualise infinities, we almost gravitate to forms of structure and limitations with the goal of proposing forms of order. It is this fundamental pattern making, that is both socially and culturally ingrained within metaphysics. It is also why we accept models such as capitalism and socialism, as they impose some order which we can break and remodel to some extent without giving in to complete anarchy. Indeed the word ‘society’ implies a meta-structure to our human relations.

What is left?

In an episteme, in which time is out of joint and the past is constantly returning in ghostly and spectral forms. This state of play is both created and reinforced by the ‘consciousness’ streamed directly into our hand-held devices. We are always on and always sharing information in a never before globally connected way. Everything seems to exist simultaneously in this non- stop, neoliberal nightmare of a capitalist realism. However, just for a second, if we follow this logic then perhaps the ‘thing’, which can aid in managing this situation is already available. The key is recognising such a moment when it smacks you on the forehead.

For me, it is the collective- or, a notion of the collective. This notion of collectivism, what Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson call ‘the new collectivism’, resists the full blown authoritarian form of state based collectivism implemented in the last century to devastating effect in both the then USSR and in Hitler’s Germany. This new collectivism, or ‘isms’, is your local ‘hacktivist’, it is your full blown terror cell and simultaneously your ‘freedom movement’- as we have witnessed across the Arab world. It forms micro community land trusts, which are fighting corporate and governmental ‘gentrification’. It also, coalesces to form activist groups, artist-led collectives, self-help groups, flash mobs and plugs the gaps in diminished welfare through charities and ‘junkyard’ initiatives. This new collectivism doesn’t identify with Marxism, Communism or Leninism. It is a product of global neoliberal capitalism, but at the same time it resists through a smorgasbord of the new and old forms of autonomy. These forms of collective activity are re-modelling a failing system- the distribution of power is beginning to see nano-shifts in its organisation. We are witnessing this shift in power through political events such as: Brexit, Trump’s America and Catalonia’s struggle for independence etc. These re-alignments appear random precisely because collective activity doesn’t have a one specific identifiable ideological basis. Each collective is different, however, they all share a trace. This trace is political, they are endeavouring to collectively change some element of the world we live in. This change is always ideological on some level, and they do it together, as a tribe. However, different they are as individuals, the collective can act as a form of catharsis against an increasingly individualised and isolationist structure of the neoliberal.

Collectivism may not be ‘the’ answer to the world’s problems, but it sure is a start. Personally, I find that the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe is increasingly becoming a support group constructed through mutual respect and collective endeavour to actively tackle social and political problems in society. It is a place, both physically and virtually, where I feel comfortable testing ideas and discussing issues. I feel my mental health is better for being a member, because I feel I belong to something greater than myself. Friendship and solidarity are loaded terms, but they belong in the Retro Bar. What is most rewarding within the Retro Bar is the unspoken role in which each of its members have undertaken. Everyone has organically taken up certain responsibilities. On a personal level, I have developed an exclusively curatorial role within the collective as I feel that is most appropriate both for the collective and also my individual practice.

Finally, the public secret is one of those oxymoron’s. It might even be the ultimate example of an oxymoron. It is through its contradictory nature that we might begin to address our collective failings and eradicate our toxic prejudices. Thus the value of art and the value of collective forms of art go beyond the fiscal. They are searching for the ethical, for a new set of parameters in which to create equilibrium. This is an unfinished project and it has a long way to go! However, the journey has begun.

Physical toil has been a common experience in this installation. Hand-printing, cutting and assembling the paper “houses” to create a vacant cityscape has been an act of minor industry. Given the setting: a warehouse on an estate at the fringes of Leeds, one of the great former industrial cities of the North, this feels totally appropriate.

Work has been on my mind; the unrecognised time spent in art production and the ambivalent “value” of artwork made with hours of toil from cheap materials, which will be seen by few and will never see the inside of a respectable white cube.

Repeated failure (shall I say, unexpected outcomes?) has haunted this production as ideas fail to take form so must radically adjust day-to-day. This is, I remind myself, necessary and the reason why art is work.

Accepting unexpected outcomes and embracing the non-value of these objects has freed me somewhat and turned the repetitive slog of (unwaged) labour back into play.

Using my body’s labour to process this waste paper into sculpture is what led me to think about ideas surrounding consumption, digestion, excreta.

More on the grotesque element later.

Like many “flexible” creative sector employees and self-employed artists, I have a complicated relationship with leisure. I am always working and never working, the threshold between work and downtime is very blurry indeed. This is a common source of anxiety for artists but increasingly with the casualisation of labour, it’s seeping into industries also (at least, for those like us on low pay). By extension, the relationship with leisure and self-medicating habits like smoking and drinking becomes complicated also. There’s an underlying desire to connect with others through pleasurable, sensory experience and temporarily escape capitalist drudgery through what Mark Fisher called “Acid Communism” after the utopian spirit present in the counter cultures of the 60s and 70s. My public secret is that whether we realise it or not, we are all looking for a form of (small “c”) communist experience when we raise a glass with strangers or share a cigarette break. These are temporary, microscopic utopian moments.

I don’t refer to my artwork as utopian. There’s little specific political or historical points of reference. What I do try and convey is that the primary experience of utopia is never escapism or nostalgia but longing. This is however, a topic that has been put through the wringer enough in recent art writing so I’ll try to be specific and brief in articulating my own thoughts on the matter…

“Utopia is not already an alternative, just as Carnival is not an alternative to work. But like many carnivals and certain so-called riots, it screams of the need for a total alternative and more dangerously still, it reveals the latency of the alternative in elements of present social life. The ‘social safety valve’ function of carnivals, utopias and riots is well known, but the effort and money spent regulating, recuperating or surpressing them betrays the authorities’ fear that too much steam might be let off, leaving a dangerous void or worse, the idea of an engine. That threat lies in a refinement of the question: no longer simply ‘why must Carnival end, why doesn’t all life look like this?’, but: “what latent power, which in Carnival/utopia we PROVE is real, is so unbearable to see shut down? And how shall we perpetuate it: how could it be switched back on and not cut off again?”

-Matthew Hyland on the utopian impulse in Carnival and riot, from Self-Insufficiency

A touchstone of my work is Francois Rabellais whose novels were important expressions of the optimism, utopian longing and the most radical desires of the common people at the time of their writing. In late medieval Europe, any form of laughter or free spirit was not condonable by church or state and common humour was pushed out of official spheres. By necessity it coalesced in self-organised events in the marketplace and during peasant celebrations, motivated by consumption, production and community participation.

Under the theocratic rule of the Middle Ages, pleasure-seeking and jubilatiom was viewed as a dissident act unless performed in a sanctioned Festival settings.

(Above: installation shot from “Colony” at Hutt Collective)

As such, comical folk culture of the middle ages had its own self-governing territory and time, creating a second world within the official feudal order where behaviour became untethered from the confines of etiquette and where profanities and blasphemies were temporarily permissable. Festivals and the market were places of frank speech, this informality eventually extended to religious parody in the form of passion plays and although mocking of sacred text was not approved by clergy it was tolerated when deemed to be instructive (providing a “grobian” fable against sinful behaviour). This was the moral backdrop to which Rabelais wrote his five books about the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel in the early to mid 16th century. Unlike other works of the grotesque e.g. Brant’s Ship of Fools or Lydgate’s Order of Fools, Gargantua and Panatgruel was not preventative fable. Despite Johann Fischart’s assertion, Rabellasian fiction is actually the opposite, it is the singlemost comical and comprehensive celebration of the grotesque and enjoyed huge popularity with all classes.

The natural territory of the Grotesque is parody. Parody is more powerful than satire as it is an all-inclusive, all-mocking form of laughter. Satire is exclusively bourgeois rhetoric whereas parody is an ancient and transcendental social-leveller.

The culture of marketplace and carnival was impressed upon Rabellais in Fontenay le Comte where he spent his youth in a the Cistercian Abbey. A famous carnival came to Fontenay three times a year along with foreign itinerant salesman. We know that carnivals such as this were important sites of bookselling both for “serious” publishers and hawkers of chapbooks. This concentrated availability of literature both “high” and “low” attracted students and clergy who contributed to the folk culture of carnival by (often anonymously) writing their own recreational literature. In this way, carnival became a place in which the normally stratified social classes intermingled along with foreigners and nomads in a time-sanctioned melting pot.

This is the essence of Grotesque Realism which Mikhail Bakhtin attributes to the transformative humour of Rabelais and the anti-feudal, popular truths of carnival. To a lesser degree he applies Grotesque Realism to Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s King Lear due to their explorations of class flux and madness.

Wolfgang Kayser describes the grotesque as “the estranged world” and an expression of the the id essential to “invoke and subdue the demonic aspect”. When we lampoon the source of our fear we overcome it temporarily. The essential nature of laughter underlines the power of the clown and fool in grotesque culture. In carnival, the fool is an inversion of the king, madness is a gleeful parody of reason, this explains the utopian importance of The Feast of Fools and the Feast of The Ass, which are comic counters to Lent and Corpus Christi. At these specific festivals, commoners are awarded titles for a day including King of Fools, Lord of Misrule and Abbot of Unreason. In this way, jocularity and the mimicry of madness or foolery muddles class and provides a pretext for liquidating the staid social order. “Every joke is a tiny revolution”.

Foucault also wrote on the disarming power of the madman’s laughter: “When the madman laughs, he already laughs with the mask of death, the lunatic, anticipating the macarbre, has disarmed it.” Mocking of existential threats and suspension of official “reason” were necassary coping mechanism for an overworked and de-powered medieval working class. If we believe Umberto Eco when he says we are living in a second middle ages, similar tactics may have to be deployed in order to bare the onslaught of nationalistic politics and perpetual austerity.

“Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP! HELP! I’m being repressed!”

I wrote the above sentence for the purpose of describing the ‘dark optimism’ behind my last major drawing projects. I feel I need to explain, in detail, what I mean, because I feel it is a good place to begin my understanding of the projects based on shared experiences and radical care that The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe is currently undertaking under the title of ‘The Public Secret’.

Today, with the resurgence of the politics of rage (symbolised by one person’s name already dominating Google searches enough to be spared from this blog), it is beyond doubt that something is disturbing our experience of contemporary life. I instinctively disagree with the idea that people are never satisfied and always have to be angry about something; I argue we are in distress and that this distress is contextual, not time-immemorial.

There may be less war, death, etc, overall (as if the fact there hasn’t been killing grounds on the scale on the first half of the 20th century makes today’s blood shed fine and dandy), but I reject this opinion as a conversation closer. Additionally, we needn’t even have go into the vast studies of the social ills brought about by the slow return to vast inequalities within countries in the global North (vitally collated by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett,) to get to the crux of my very own wager on a shared experience and why I feel it is so important.

An article from the Irish Times by Fintan O’Toole has been shared around social media of late. I can’t disagree with his argument that Trump’s [sorry, I did say I wouldn’t feed that word into the algorithm belly] actions, and non-actions are trial runs for fascism. This scenario is certainly looking likely. We tend to think of algorithms in regards to echo chambers of consumer tastes, without realising that consumer taste itself has long been allowed to creep into all aspects of life, averting us from anything we may or may not already like. The hyperconnected age as we know it has allowed the forcefulness of consumer choice to be in every moment of our lives (it was Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism who said when we sleep we dream of capital), to feed us what we already know and feel comfortable with, from conversations, beliefs and adverts themselves, giving us meme-fixes in an (unsurprisingly) increasingly sad and lonely world. If it has engendered echo chambers, then intolerance and fascistic tendencies to shut down different views are, and are proving to be, the natural next step.

I felt so down after reading the article, and knew my hard-faced self-defensiveness to its likelihood would only lead to feeling tired, and thus wanting to be drunk, as I always do when I can’t affix a positive to anything tangible. Yet I have a riposte; not to O’Toole himself, but to the sense of doom that this likely scenario instils. I want to return to the above words….

‘…The Hyperconnected age as we know it…’

For this is speculatively an oxymoron, if you stick with what I’m about to suggest.

We have entered an age of information abundance through a consumer capitalist reality; despite the idealism and hopes of 21st century progress placed on this certain abundance in the final moments of the 20th century (which still haunt us), we entered the age of info-everything from within a culture dominated by the mechanisms of consumer capitalism, which are designed to maintain a reproduction of feelings of lack, inadequacy, and a unending desire to be more than what we already are. But the ‘fear of missing out’ (fomo) that has exploded with the onset of communication technology doesn’t just inform our so-called dumb and stupid needs, but also out needs to know more, to be informed, to know ‘the truth’.

All of this has propelled an entire civilisation into an ‘always on’ state of over-exposure to the ills of all-time. In an age that we thought would be so beautiful, the hell of yesteryear manifests itself in a psychic, private trauma (“Hiroshima reoccurs in a fractalized and mental form”). The traumas and injustices of all time have all risen to the surface all at once, and no cognitive walls or levees can fully keep them all out of sight.

In cultural ecologist Joe Brewer’s viral 2016 article ‘the pain you feel is capitalism dying’ he shed light on the very public secret where the political compromises that once made capitalist society bearable for a big enough number of people still assert themselves, despite that lived experience having broken down for the vast majority. Because this experience remains a public secret it is experienced as personal failure, a daily shame millions carry around with them, and this is perhaps most painfully felt in the countries where standards of living have either stagnated or fallen over the period we most commonly know as neoliberalism (but, what I prefer to call ‘endgame capitalism’).

The User/Addicts at the End of the Universe?

I believe the persistence of the unbearable is maintained due to its addictiveness. And one essential ingredient of the public secret of contemporary life is that most of us, not just the ‘spice’ users coiled up in city doorsteps, are engaging with life as users/addicts. This engagement with contemporary technology is a result of the continuation of consumer (‘fomo’) culture into an age where there are no gaps, no room for continuity. With continuity comes dream/desire-space; with fragmentation comes the pursuit of fixes, scores, hits. But because the addictions reproduce this fragmented life texture, it is very hard to imagine a way out.

Yet, again, it is also seen as a weakness to admit what all this does to our memory. In Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life he says “the past keeps returning because we can’t remember the present”. Yet I have often been scoffed at because I can’t recall contemporary culture (whatever that is), and reference a period when my experience of life didn’t feel so fragmented. Amnesia for the present is very much an aspect of our contemporary public secrets.

I visualise the present moment as one of being crushed into a corner between the best and worst possible worlds humanity will have ever known, with our immediate reaction to this pain being to side with the worst option. We know so much, too much arguably, that it seems so logical to implement all this knowledge to make life more sustainable, fair and healthy for the majority. However, the deadlock, the locked horns, is generating an intolerable heat that is producing insane geopolitical situations and insane levels of internalised violence. Within this context, independent news sources can continue to expose the flaws and injustices of power; activists on and offline can continue to stand up to the demagogues, and preachers of hate, but they may well just be fuelling the fire out of which these figures sprung …and believe me, I say this with trepidation, and with full respect to those who do engage in the aforementioned activities…

…After all, surely most of us would want to see a world where there is less suffering and misery…?

I don’t believe the aspects of today’s public secret that I have mentioned already are its primary features. But I do believe the aforementioned situational assessment I give is a justification to argue that working to create spaces for shared experiences and raising public secrets to the surface may actually be our only chance of collectively surviving the 21st century in any bearable and dignified way. Because what we have at our finger tips, if only we can properly actualise it, is a new era where we aren’t just ‘aware’ of mental health, but it becomes the foundation stone for a new age which is built around structures of collective care. A beautiful future.

As a group of artists and thinkers, I feel it is time for us to give up trying to be smart, and think more about being earnest and honest.

I believe this means returning to putting our hearts on the line, being honest about our own hells within a context that doesn’t come across as simply indulgent.

When I’ve put many things onto the internet in the past, without admitting to myself that I was in need of empathic engagement, it is nearly always a regret due to interventive responses always being ego-based; either telling me I need to sort myself out, or just being angry with me.

It’s hard to find a way of talking about your own weaknesses in an age of anxious identitarianism, but if I explain that I am doing so from a place of seeing it as a necessary act of honesty for the aim of shared experiences, maybe I can be spared the aggro of unwanted respomses.

I can only reach out on the half chance that as I am finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a beneficiary mental state on a daily basis, then so too are many, or not most, others.

I have to make it explicit that my most honest reasons as to why I can’t, not only find well-being, but can’t find a self I can live with, are words expressed in the hope that others feels the same, as for that to happen it then becomes ‘political’.

Yet I don’t mean ‘political’ in the sense of one groups’ ability to gain self-determination in the face of another (oppressor) group; I mean a wager on the chances that this ‘political’ issue bleeds right through class, race, gender and geographical boundaries, whilst, still, simultaneously being a product of the reality those boundaries enable the existence of.

For the premise here is that contemporary life, with its assaulting information, competitive individualism, 24/7 security paranoia, and actually-existing climate change (delete, or add, as you see fit) is proving to be toxic to the average psyche.

We can pick and choose, and sift through who is more deserving and undeserving within this global crisis, BUT LOOK: how can anybody argue against a fundamental rupture, or break out of the current situation being the only hope for everyone in long run? I’m not going give time to the pseudo-nihilism of ‘nowt you can do-ism’, because we all use that strategy for defense from time and time, and that is all it should stand for …..fuck: what I’m trying to say is nobody is a cunt here, unless we’re all cunts and I refuse to take that position, because I believe it is a result of an acceptance of the world existing under a depressive realism.

I believe in symbolic moments, because I believe most people do too (there wouldn’t be so much hope raised around a successful world cup run for our national team if they didn’t). But, in spite of things that should have ushered this in (Brexit, Grenfel, Trump, whatever) we haven’t seen something big enough yet, at least from the position of peace, love and all that hippy shit from the last century, that is, actually, the goal, once we manage to pull away all the dead skin of cynicism from the past few decades.

LONG LIVE ACID COMMUNISM…..And on to the next collective member for dispatches no2!